With the last week being the holidays, many of the cocktail writers have been doing more research than writing, so expect some great posts in the coming week! However, the ones that did write provide some glorious ways to ring in the new year as well as recaps of their year at the bar, distillery, or other.
• Tiare of A Mountain of Crushed Ice wishes us a happy new year and offers up a seasonal spiced rum Champagne cocktail, the Poinsettia, to celebrate. She also reviews Master of Malt’s Curaçao Bitters and makes a few drinks with it including one temptingly called the Naughty Gentleman.
• Alcademic’s Camper English meets the new year by summing up the old. He provides impressive summaries of everywhere he was published and traveled this year; and yes, he needed extra pages for his passport sewn in. One of his upcoming honors will be to judge Speed Rack this Sunday the 8th in San Francisco; buy tickets and help charity! Camper has not forgotten his ice freezing project and discusses how lakes freeze up in the winter in comparison to ice cube trays. Speaking of places Camper has published, he writes about Aleko Lilly’s All the Gin Joints in FineCooking. Finally, he displays Honor Bar’s cocktail menu in Emeryville including sherry and acid phosphate-containing drinks.
• Frederic Yarm of Cocktail Virgin/Slut gives an overview of some of the better moments of his drinking year including a 19th century bar crawl, and reflects back on the best drinks he had in 2011 out at bars in Boston and in his travels as well as at home from modern and vintage drink books. While out on the town, Fred drinks and tells about Hawthorne’s Manhattan-like Buckminster, Trina’s Starlite Lounge’s beer cocktail, the KillDevil, and Eastern Standard’s chocolate-strawberry whiskey drink, the Augusta. At home, he makes an intriguing gin drink, the Silk Road Sour, that reminds him of a Pegu Club, and an 1870s libation, the Fifth Avenue Hotel Ice Punch.
• Whiskey Forge’s Matt Rowley reflects on his dad’s Onion Rye Bread and offers up the recipe for it along with a warning that there might not be a crumb of it left a day later. Ever strip out the hot white veins and seeds from chili peppers for a dish and not know what to do with them? Matt suggests a great use for them, so save them. Patricia Quintana’s Toluca Valley-style Salsa de Venas from Mulli: el libro de los moles is perfect for a waste not want not kitchen.
